Well, I would definately be interested in knowing what mods, as it would definately help improve the concept.


But that just serves to reinforce the point. Alone, both approaches to handling the Attribute-Concept are flawed, and leave glaring holes in either the versatility of these characteristics, or in their expression. Together, however, they are able to create a far more diverse end product.

Just to be clear, when you wrote "every Attribute apply to every skill" you meant a system in which several skills contribute a small percentage towards raising each Attribute? Or am I misunderstanding what you wrote?

If that's what you meant, then some mods that do this are Oblivion's Kobu's Character Advancement System (which pioneered the "Great Wheel" concept), Realistic Leveling and nGCD. I believe Galsiah's Character Leveling mod for Morrowind might have a similar feature, but I can't say for sure as I've never used it.

Oh, no, I meant that every Attribute has some impact on some aspect of what a Skill governs. So, for instance, with Armour, Agility impacts your seed and mobility, Strength impacts your Stamina Consumption, and Endurance impacts your ability to shrug off niggling injuries (things that dont actually get through the armour, but can leave you numb or otherwise impair your health). Or, for Destruction, Intelligence can increase your raw output, Endurance can influence your Magicka Consumption, and Agility can increase your recovery time between spell-Strikes.


I've never been able to come up with a way to incorporate every traditional Attribute into some aspect of every Skill, though you can get close with some. Of course, uniformity isn't necessary either, and you could have 5 Attributes impacting one skill, and only 3 impacting another... But ive found that you can reasonably link 3 Attributes to some aspect of each skill, allowing you to branch out the use and expression of both that Skill, and the Attributes.


Actually increasing the values of said Attributes is something of another issue, though I have heard good things in that regard about some Oblivion mods... I just can't bring myself to reinstall the game.

Ah, okay, I misunderstood what you were saying then. Sorry about that.

Not a problem. We may not agree on a lot of things, but that doesn't mean I'm going to bite your head off over a misunderstanding.

This is my main gripe with Bethesda. Morrowind was far from perfect in their use of Attributes. But they were present, not just in some folks' imagination. Instead of working on the system and trying to make it better, or more realistic, they just dropped the whole thing. Attributes are now gone from TES and I don't see them ever coming back. Players today don't want that anymore. They want auto-hit and increased damage as benchmarks.

That shows a remarkable detachment from the gaming community. Players WANT more options, more mechanics, more stats, more 'RPG' elements. Even in things like Call of Duty and Battlefield, the demand is for more impactful options on equipment and loadouts, rather than simply cosmetic changes. Everywhere you turn, no matter the Genre, the cry is for MORE complexity, MORE options, and MORE depth.

The problem isn't players being lazy, or wanting instant gratification, or just craving a power trip. The problem is trying to deliver more options without sacrificing decades of advancement. Old ways of doing things just don't mesh with newer dynamics. For example, you can't have To-Hit rolls when you have AI that actively tries to avoid getting hit. And because that old variable can't be carried over, you then need to figure out what new variables you can include to keep that sense of progression relevant, without sacrificing the progress you've made.

oh wow I like this idea..but doing it like that wouldnt it create a jack of all trades character more often? When a skill like destruction or sword gains something from almost every attribute wouldnt we just raise each one to fully realise a badass destruction mage or unstopable sword fighter?

I admit I'm not in the midst of any "gaming community" (other than here). But from the games I see being produced and the sales numbers nearly every game has, I have to "assume" that players are buying the games they find fun, with easier advancement, less depth, and more player-based mouse-click skills involved. There are some exceptions, of course (like the Shadowrun games), but the big sellers seem to leave me empty when I try them.

Players may say they want what you talk about, but their wallets tell me otherwise, from my observations

The problem with this is that skills already do those things themselves, either by general skill increases, or via perks. By switching those elements over to attributes, you just end up with what I said before, where a skill has its total power spread out across so many different aspects that each point of each thing is negligible.

All of those things are in one skill because that's what makes the skill feel powerful. If you do all that stuff you said with how agility, strength, and endurance interact with armor, you are either left with

A. An armor skill that feels worthless, since all it does is increase your armor rating, whereas 90% of the other effects of armor are in non armor stats such as agility, strength, and endurance.

B. An armor skill that feels worthless, since, while it does those things itself, so much of the possible power those effects could have had in the skill itself have been torn out and shoved into attributes, resulting in both giving paltry increases.

There is also this problem.

Putting these sort of things into attributes only goes back to the problems Morrowind had, where raising things like strength made you good with ALL melee weapons.

As it stands now, Heavy Armor is different from light armor since both are wholly unconnected. However, in the system you propose, where

"Agility impacts your seed and mobility, Strength impacts your Stamina Consumption, and Endurance impacts your ability to shrug off niggling injuries"

Getting better in heavy armor will also make you far better with light armor for these same reasons, making every character increasingly similar.

The great problem with attributes is that they bundle a whole bunch of very basic things together into one stat, and that those things would effect many skills. You can't have true character diversity with attributes, as raising attributes will always make you better in tons of things not part of your character build, due to how bundled attributes are. That is part of why Skyrim did what it did by getting rid of attributes as a separate thing, and moved all of the things they controlled into thier respective stats. It increases character diversity because you are no longer forced to bundle. Bringing attributes back just goes back to all those bundling problems past games had.

Maybe the problem that theres just to few of them maybe there needs to be more the just strenght, intelligence, agility, endurance, luck speed, willpower and personality? creating more might just make it more convoluted though.

Just take a look at mods that PC gamers who make mods made that add back the attributes and keep the perks system, it works. If you play the PC version of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim on PC.

That's actually relatively easy to resolve by linking Perk Points specifically to Skills and Skill Gains. Then again, I've never been fond of the whole 'A skill gets better by X' every level concept. Skills and knowledge bases don't progress uniformly, and the way that has been handled previously only contributes to the homogeneous feel of many Builds. All Swordsmen are the same, all Alteration Mages are the same, all Marksmen are the same. Dropping the automatic progress allows for far more diferentation within the Skills, rather than having skills advance uniformly with a few differing 'Power Ups'.


The Jack of All Trades 'Problem' (I dint think its a problem at all, really) isn't going to be solve by any means beyond outright preventing use of some skills. While locking out some things is an option I would like to see, it's something that should be a clear and deliberate choice, not a happenstance of what skills you choose to specialise in or advance.


Because of that, you really only have one way to manage it: Time Investment. The longer it takes to master everything, the less likely people are to try to do it. The two main ways to do this are slowing down progression, and giving more options.


The first is pretty straight forward, but could be done in different ways. Actually increasing the work to level Skills, slowing the progression of Skills based on a Bell Curve, the old Major/Minor system...


But giving more options is a trickier fish. You could carve up skills into increasingly smaller and more specific categories, forcing you to basically level the same Skill 3 or 4 times. This is the approach Morrowind took, and frankly I think it's abhorrent. Another option is to give you more ways to change or shape the Skills and how they work. This is part of the philosophy behind Perks, and is the philosophy that I think has the most potential.


Combining the two: Managing gains and shaping skills, is the only real way to address the Jack of All Trades issue without imposing flat out restrictions. And giving you a model that creates an incentive to speciallise, rather than generalise or just pick and choose at random, helps with that.




I've actually played with the idea of 9 Attributes, and it could work, but I think that would be the extent of how kany you could reasonably handle.

Haha I are the first to vote yes they will return

This poll shows a lot of lack of confidence in Bethesda

Yea. There would be a point of diminishing returns after awhile. The ones they had fairly covered the physical and mental aspects of a character. Luck is an interesting "randomizer." I would like to a see a separation between bodily dexterity and finger dexterity, though.

Guilty!

The only accurate answer to the poll is "I don't know." None of us works for Bethesda. Bethesda developers themselves probably don't know if Attributes will return yet.

IIRC, Vanilla Vegas did not have rising attributes via leveling up. Not that it mattered, as the game had a trillion ways of raising all of your attributes across the board until everything was hovering around nine or ten.

While I'm kind of okay with getting an attribute point every five to ten levels and reducing the total to ten, there's something about it that just rubs me the wrong way, especially when it comes to TES. There's something more progressive about the series, and while you can change how your character starts out to how they end, the difference is incremental, and is frankly kind of punishing to someone that wants their character to start out one way, but end up as something else.

While true, I frankly think the idea of Skill Trees is conceptually one of the best ideas TES ever added into the franchise. Sure, Skyrim's take on it is decisively not good, but there's something to be said to actually control how your character utilizes certain skills, and aiming for specializing within that facet of the skill. The Skill Trees are also ways to reintroduce older skill concepts from Daggerfall back into the game. While Skills like Streetwise or Etiquette are quite niche, they can make a comeback via a well thought out Speech Tree, or Climbing and Acrobatics via a Athletic Tree.

Frankly, I much prefer a well done model for the Trees then a static 1-100 system that dictates your characters effectiveness. Not only does it potentially offer way more variety and content into the game, it also gives the player a lot more creative freedom in the hows and whats of building their own character. You could actually have two different characters with the same Skill set up, and have them behave completely differently with their own set of strengths and weaknesses.

Related to all... I think we can all trust Bethesda to do what they do best. Blindside us with a really great idea, that is ultimately implemented in such a minimalistic, sloppy or proof-of-Concept way as to make it almost cringe worthy. Doesn't matter if it's Leveling, or Radiant AI, or Perks, or Dialogue, or Factions, or Crafting, or Settlements, Bethesda always tries to do something cool that could frankly be revolutionary, and then trips over its own feet.


Anyway... Ultimately, the core issue here is the functional representation of abstract concepts, in this case Bodily Capabilities, and Knowledge and Expertise. In most RPGs, these are represented through Attributes and Skills respectively, and so that's how people recognise them. So, when how those characteristics and how they interact is represented differently, it is a very jarring experience. This is clear from the reaction to both Skyrim and Fallout 4, who went in opposite directions with their shifts. What they represent is all (or mostly) still there, but the packaging has changed. And I remain 100% commited to my belief that the change was for the better... At least in so far as the end product is better than what came before.


It is, however, not for the BEST. Of course, what is 'Best' is going to be subjective. For me, at least, functionality trumps style and make-beelieve. If a Feature, Skill, Attribute or Perk isn't going to DO something different, there is no reason to have it. The Weapon Skills of Morrowind are a good example of this problem, with 4 seperatr skills that all did the same thing, just with superficially different 'Skins' (while at the same time having no real interaction in their knowledge base and severely compromising the entire Skill concept...). The more functionality, the better a system. So, the goal should be the system that offers the most functionality, for the least work. This is what i would call 'Best'.


The changes that have occured, both in Skyrim and Fallout 4, have ultimately added more functionality to their respective systems in comparison to the previous iteration, which is why I argue that they are better. But, the functionality they offer is still less than a better use of a joint dynamic, and a more concise integration of how Attributes and Skills interact. You can be strong without knowing how to hit for maximum effect, you can be agile without being quiet. You can be smart, and still stand there drooling at an equation.


The old system focused entirely on the actual totality of Attributes. You automatically put your all into everything, and more importantly KNEW how to do so. In the new system, you LEARN how to commit those Bodily Characteristics, but then lack the ability to really define their individual value. Both are inherently flawed, though the new one allows for more options than the latter, particularly because it interacts so well with the Skill Concept. Part of learning a Skill is learnjng how go apply your innate, bodily capabilities to what you are doing. It's as much a factor of knowledge as it is of actual capability. Combining the totality with the expression, however allows for more options than either individually...


Skills themselves are another issue, of course. They are, all by themselves, abstract representations of rather broad and interconnected knowledge bases. Most games will give you something like a History skill, though that may cover anything from ancient languages, to a particular region, to archeological patterns. They all work together to increase ones greater understanding and comprehension, but they also can spiral quite deep into specialisation, without sacrificing aspects of general application.


It's this reason that Perks are so valuable, especially in the model Skyrim presented. They can be used to both represent the specialisation of Knowledge, but also the interaction of your bodily characteristics with your knowledge base. And this is why Skill Trees and the Perks that make them up are such a valuable addition, even without having a more overt Attribute-Model. With such an Attribute-Model, this ability to express the actual nuance of Knowledge and Expertise, and it's interaction with Bodily Capabilities, is where you stand to create some truely wonderous functional options.

Not really, as Skyrim already worked that way. 99% of the additional damage you got for one handed weapons came from perks, not the skill itself. Most skills in Skyrim contributed little to nothing to the thing they controlled, and only served as perk gates.

However, removing many of those things and putting them into attributes would still result in the same problem as mentioned before. Now instead of +20% damage increase perk every one of the 5 tiered perks, its not only 10 because you ripped the other 10 out to put into attributes, or w/e perk you wanna use as an example.

It's way too easy to become a jack of all trades of anything in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim.

Sigh, it's possible to work the attributes and the perks to contribute to each other and make sure attributes and skills serve a purpose.

Having the attributes and perks and skills can be balanced.

I feel lime there's no real way to continue without getting into more specifics, which is something I've avoided because I think it belongs more in Beyond Skyrim (and it's bound to be a very long winded ramble that, frankly I don't look forward to typing). I may bite the bullet and put it here, or may put it there, bit i get the feeling that im going to have to knuckle down and do it, as I feel we've started talking about different things.


Sufficed to say, I see what yours saying, and agree, but I think part of the wider vision is missing the mark.




It absolutely is, but that doesn't mean you should be prevented from accomplishing it. It needs to be made more difficult (which translates as 'Needs to take longer) but its not something that should be outright restricted.

I never said that we should be prevented from accomplishing stuff did I?

You should already know I love it a lot more when I do stuff when they are harder. Also we should be able to fail at some stuff.

I didn't mean to imply you did, I was just trying to cover my ass in terms of clarity. Misunderstandings have happened, and things have been taken out of context before.

You got me rolling with this! Thanks for the morning smiles